Florida, a swing state, had a major recount dispute that took center stage in the election. Thus, the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election was not known for more than a month after balloting, because of the extended process of counting and then recounting of Florida presidential ballots. State results tallied on election night gave 246 electoral votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush and 255 to Democratic nominee Al Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call that evening. The arithmetic of the available electoral votes in all three states meant that at that point, the result in Florida was all that mattered, and even when both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of the eventual loser Gore over the following few days, the drama in Florida uniquely dragged out for several weeks before eventually settling the election for the entire nation.

Initially Florida had been considered fertile territory for Republicans. It was governed by Jeb Bush, a staunch conservative and George W. Bush's brother. Nonetheless Republicans focused significant advertising resources in the large state, and later polls indicated that the state result was very much in play as late as September 2000.[1] Some late momentum for Gore and his Jewish running mate Joe Lieberman may also have come from the significant Jewish population in southern Florida.[2] Also, voters from reliable blue states in the Northeast had been migrating to Florida since the 1950s, and the Asian and Hispanic immigrant population was growing, counterbalancing Republican gains and putting the state in play in 2000.[citation needed]

Meanwhile there was heavy backlash in the Cuban-American population against Democrats during the Elian Gonzalez dispute, during which Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's Attorney General, ordered 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez to be returned to Cuba. The Democrats' share of the Cuban vote dropped dramatically from 1996.[citation needed]

In late October, one poll found that Gore was leading Bush and third parties by 44-42-4 among registered voters and 46-42-4 among likely voters, but the poll had a margin of error of four percentage points, making the race a statistical dead heat.[3]

The controversy began on election night, when the national television networks, using information provided to them by the Voter News Service, an organization formed by the Associated Press to help determine the outcome of the election through early result tallies and exit polling, first called Florida for Gore in the hour after polls closed in the eastern peninsula (which is in the Eastern time zone) but before they had closed in the heavily Republican counties of the western panhandle (which is in the Central time zone). Once the polls had closed in the panhandle, the networks retracted their call for Gore, calling the state for Bush; they then retracted that call as well, finally indicating the state was "too close to call".[4] Gore made a concession phone call to Bush the night of the election, then retracted it after learning just how close the election was.[5] Bush won the election-night vote count in Florida by 1,784 votes. Florida state law provided for an automatic recount due to the small margins. Once it became clear that Florida would decide the winner of the presidential election, the media focused on the Florida recount.

The Florida election has been closely scrutinized since the election. After the election results were announced, charges were raised that some irregularities favored Bush. Among these was the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot," which some pundits claimed produced an "unexpectedly" large number of votes for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan. Conservative opinion commentators countered that the same ballot was successfully used in the 1996 election with no post-election protests.[6] Progressive commentators also claimed that there was a purge from the Florida voting rolls of over 54,000 citizens identified as felons, of whom 54% were African-American, and that the majority of these were not felons and should have been eligible to vote under Florida law.[7] (The presumption was that had they been able to express themselves at the polls, their likely choice would have been the Democratic candidate.[8]) Additionally, there were charges that there were many more "overvotes" than usual, especially in predominantly African-American precincts in Duval county (Jacksonville), where some 27,000 ballots showed two or more choices for President. Unlike the much-discussed Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot", the Duval County ballot spread choices for President over two pages with instructions to "vote on every page" on the bottom of each page.[9] On the other side of the ledger, conservatives and Republicans charged that Democrats had registered non-citizens to vote, deliberately suppressed the overseas military vote, and arbitrarily changed vote-counting criteria after the election.[10]

Following the election a number of studies have been made of the electoral process in Florida by Democrats, Republicans, and other interested parties. A number of flaws and improprieties have been discovered in the process. Controversies included:

All five major US TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) made the incorrect assumption that all of Florida's polls closed at 7:00 p.m. EST. All five of them reported this incorrect information at the top of the 6:00-7:00 hour. In fact, the westernmost counties in Florida had polls open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they are in the Central Time Zone. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. Because of the above mistaken assumption, some media outlets reported at 7:00 p.m. EST that all polls had closed in the state of Florida. Also, significantly, the Voter News Service called the state of Florida for Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000, which theoretically reduced Bush's margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes;[11] a study by John Lott found that Bush's margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes.[12] This survey assumes that the turnout in the Panhandle counties would have equaled the statewide average of 68% if the media had not incorrectly reported the polls' closing time and if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. This opens the possibility that Bush would have won by a larger margin and controversy would have been avoided if the networks had known and reported the correct poll closing times and called the state after all polls were closed. In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the premature calls for Gore's victory ranked #2 on a list of TV's ten biggest "blunders", and were blamed for ushering in a new era of public distrust of the media.[13]

Democratic State Senator Daryl Jones said that there had to have been an order to set up roadblocks in heavily Democratic regions of the state on the day of the election.[14] This charge, however, has never been substantiated.

Democratic lawyer Mark Herron authored a memo distributed to Democratic election canvassers on how to invalidate military absentee ballots. The Herron Memo stated postmark and "point of origin" criteria Herron maintained could be used to invalidate military ballots. But the Herron Memo was in line with a letter sent out by Secretary of State Katherine Harris stating that if a postmark was not present on a military ballot, it had to be thrown out. On November 19, 2000, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and said that election officials should give the "benefit of the doubt" to military voters rather than disqualifying any overseas ballots that lacked required postmarks or witness signatures. Until that point, the Democrats had pursued a strategy of persuading counties to strictly enforce those requirements by disqualifying illegal ballots and reducing votes from overseas, which were predominantly cast for Bush.[15] Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Gore backer, later told the counties to go back and reconsider those ballots without a postmark.[16]

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris became a controversial figure during the Florida electoral recount.

Democrats claimed that between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state, Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, contracted with DBT Online Inc., at a cost of $4.294 million, to have the "scrub list"s reworked. Nearly 1% of Florida's electorate and nearly 3% of its African-American voters — 96,000 citizens — were listed as felons and removed from the voting rolls. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, some listed "felonies" were dated years in the future, and some apparently were random.) It was contended that in a small minority of cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and some successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote, but most were not told that they weren't allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls, with the company directed not to use cross-checks or its sophisticated verification plan (used by the FBI).[19]

People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen(1 p.25) have argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states) to request clemency and a restoration of their rights from Governor Jeb Bush, in a process that could take two years and ultimately was left to Bush's discretion. (In 1998 Schlenther v. Florida Department of State held that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.)

The Brooks Brothers riot: Democrats claimed that Republicans brought in outside, paid activists to hinder the manual recount in Miami-Dade County, which was allegedly shut down "shortly after" screaming protesters arrived who were allegedly Republican Party members flown in from other states, some at Republican Party expense.[20]

The suppression of vote pairing. In brief, websites sprang up to match Nader supporters in swing states like Florida with Gore supporters in non-swing states like Texas: the Nader supporters in Florida would vote for Gore and the Gore supporters in Texas would vote for Nader. This would have allowed Nader to get his fair share of the vote and perhaps get into the Presidential debates while allowing Gore to carry swing states. Six Republican state secretaries of state, led by Bill Jones of California, threatened the websites with criminal prosecution and caused some of them to reluctantly shut down. The ACLU got involved in a legal (not political) effort to protect the sites, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Jones two years later, but by then the election was over. The vote-pairing sites allegedly tallied 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida who voted for Gore.[21][22]

The actions of the Florida Supreme Court drew fierce criticism from Republicans, who argued that the court was exceeding its authority and issuing rulings biased in Gore's favor. The court acted "on its own motion" to stop the official certification of the election while specifically allowing the recount to continue. The Gore legal team never requested that court action, but the contention was that Florida law gives the court the right to take action without such a request.[23] Similarly, the court's December 10, 2000 ruling ordered a statewide counting of undervotes, which the Gore team had also not requested.[24]James Baker, among other Republicans, accused the court of violating longstanding Florida law, on which basis Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.[25] Democrats argued that the Florida Supreme Court was simply trying to ensure a fair and accurate count.[26]

Allegations were raised that many voters in Palm Beach County who intended to vote for Gore or Bush actually marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots because of the ballot's confusing layout. However, this evidence is disputed.

Some commentators and observers have asserted that an unusually large number of ballots were spoiled because of two votes in the same race, with one of those two votes for Pat Buchanan with the other for Bush or Gore.

Buchanan said on The Today Show, November 9, 2000: "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore."[27] He, unlike the voters, did not see the ballot before Election Night.

Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9, 2000 that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there",[28] Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell, responded by calling that "nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded: "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said: "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."[29]

The ballot was redesigned earlier that year by Theresa LePore (Supervisor of Elections, and member of the Democratic Party).[30] She said that she used both sides of the ballot in order to make the candidate names larger so the county's elderly residents could more easily see the names.[31]

Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida Election Code 102.141 mandated a statewide machine recount.[32] In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts.[33] The county canvassing board would then decide whether to recount as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts.[34] If the board discovered an error, they were then authorized to recount the ballots.[35]

The canvassing board did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial mandated recount.

The Bush campaign sued to prevent additional recounts on the basis that no errors were found in the tabulation method until subjective measures were applied in manual recounts.

The Gore campaign, as allowed by Florida statute, requested that disputed ballots in four counties be counted by hand. Florida statutes also required that all counties certify and report their returns, including any recounts, by 5 p.m. on November 14. The manual recounts were time-consuming, and, when it became clear that some counties would not complete their recounts before the deadline, both Volusia and Palm Beach Counties sued to have their deadlines extended.

The trial of Palm Beach Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris was a response from the Bush campaign to state litigation against extending the statutory deadlines for the manual recounts. Besides deadlines, also in dispute were the criteria that each county's canvassing board would use in examining the overvotes and/or undervotes. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily Democratic counties would be unfair.

Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered the recount to proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court with an order vacating its earlier decision. In its opinion, the Supreme Court cited several areas where the Florida Supreme Court had violated both the federal and Florida constitutions. The Court further held that it had "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons given by the Florida Supreme Court for its decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified its ruling on this matter while the United States Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore.

At 4:00 p.m. EST on December 8, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4 to 3 vote, ordered a manual recount, under the supervision of the Leon County Circuit Court and Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, of disputed ballots in all Florida counties and the portion of Miami-Dade county in which such a recount was not already complete. That decision was announced on live world-wide television by the Florida Supreme Court's spokesman Craig Waters, the Court's public information officer. The Court further ordered that only undervotes be considered. The results of this tally were to be added to the November 14 tally.

The recount was in progress on December 9, when the United States Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissenting), granted Bush's emergency plea for a stay of the Florida Supreme Court recount ruling, stopping the incomplete recount.

About 10 p.m. EST on December 12, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush. Seven of the nine justices saw constitutional problems with the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution in the Florida Supreme Court's plan for recounting ballots, citing differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount. Five justices held there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped and Florida be allowed to certify its vote, effectively ending the legal review of the vote count with Bush in the lead. The decision was extremely controversial due to its partisan split and the majority's irregular instruction that its judgment in Bush v. Gore should not set precedent but should be "limited to the present circumstances". Gore conceded the election, but said he disagreed with the Court's decision.

This ruling stopped the vote recount, allowing Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's certification of the election results to stand. This allowed Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him president-elect.

The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes, making it the tightest race of the campaign (at least in percentage terms; New Mexico was decided by 363 votes but has a much smaller population, with those 363 votes representing a 0.061% margin while the 537 votes in Florida were just 0.009%). Most of the reduction in the recount came from Miami-Dade county alone.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted a Florida Ballot Project comprehensive review of all ballots uncounted (by machine) in the Florida 2000 presidential election, both undervotes and overvotes, with the main research aim being to report how different ballot layouts correlate with voter mistakes. The total number of undervotes and overvotes in Florida amounted to 3% of all votes cast in the state. The review's findings were reported in the media during the week after November 12, 2001.

The NORC study was not primarily intended as a determination of which candidate "really won". Analysis of the results found that different standards for the hand-counting of machine-uncountable ballots would lead to different results. The results according to the various standards were reported in the newspapers that funded the recount, such as The Miami Herald[40] and the Washington Post.[41]

After the election, recounts conducted by various United States news media organizations indicated that Bush would have won if certain recounting methods had been used (including the one favored by Gore at the time of the Supreme Court decision) but that Gore might have won under other scenarios.[43]

USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes: ballots that did not register any vote when counted by machine. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today, show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes.[44] Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:

Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush won by 1,665 votes.

Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush won by 884 votes.

Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush won by 363 votes.

Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore won by 3 votes.

The study remarks that because of the possibility of mistakes, it is difficult to conclude that Gore was surely the winner under the strict standard. It also remarks that there are variations between examiners, and that election officials often did not provide the same number of undervotes as were counted on Election Day. Furthermore, the study did not consider overvotes, ballots that registered more than one vote when counted by machine.

The study also found that undervotes break down into two distinct types, those coming from punch-card counties, and those coming from optical-scan counties. Undervotes from punch-card counties give new votes to candidates in roughly the same proportion as the county's official vote. Furthermore, the number of undervotes correlates with how well the punch-card machines are maintained, and not with factors such as race or socioeconomic status. Undervotes from optical-scan counties, however, correlate with Democratic votes more than Republican votes. Optical-scan counties were the only places in the study where Gore gained more votes than Bush, 1,036 to 775.

A larger consortium of news organizations, including USA Today, The Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, The Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, Bush won under stricter standards and Gore won under looser standards.[45] A Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request, but one could argue that the recount of overvotes should have happened nonetheless, because faxes discovered after the media recount indicated that the judge overseeing the recount effort intended to have overvotes counted. These were faxes between Judge Terry Lewis and the canvassing boards throughout the state.[46]

According to the study, only 3% of the 111,261 overvotes had markings that could be interpreted as a legal vote. According to Anthony Salvado, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who acted as a consultant on the media recount, most of the errors were caused by ballot design, ballot wording, and efforts by voters to choose both a president and a vice-president. For example, 21,188 of the Florida overvotes, or nearly one-fifth of the total, originated from Duval County, where the presidential race was split across two pages. Voters were instructed to "vote every page". Half of the overvotes in Duval County had one presidential candidate marked on each page, making their vote illegal under Florida law. Salvado says that this error alone cost Gore the election.

Including overvotes in the above totals for undervotes gives different margins of victory:

Lenient standard. Gore by 332 votes.

Palm Beach standard. Gore by 242 votes.

Two-corner standard. Bush by 407 votes.

Strict standard. Bush by 152 votes.

As stated by Lance DeHaven Smith in his interview with Research in Review at Florida State University:[47]

...Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000...

A nationwide December 14–21, 2000 Harris poll asked "If everyone who tried to vote in Florida had their votes counted for the candidate who they thought they were voting for -- with no misleading ballots and infallible voting machines -- who do you think would have won the election, George W. Bush or Al Gore?". The results were 49% for Gore and 40% for Bush with 11% unable to make up their mind or not wishing to respond.[48]

Technically the voters of Florida cast their ballots for electors: representatives to the Electoral College. In 2000 Florida was allocated 25 electors because it had 23 congressional districts and 2 senators. All candidates who appear on the ballot or qualify to receive write-in votes must submit a list of 25 electors, who pledge to vote for their candidate and his or her running mate. Whoever wins the majority of votes in the state is awarded all 25 electoral votes. Their chosen electors then vote for President and Vice President. Although electors are pledged to their candidate and running mate, they are not obligated to vote for them. An elector who votes for someone other than his or her candidate is known as a faithless elector.

The electors of each state and the District of Columbia met on December 18, 2000[49] to cast their votes for President and Vice President. The Electoral College itself never meets as one body. Instead the electors from each state and the District of Columbia met in their respective capitols.

The following were the members of the Electoral College from the state. All were pledged to and voted for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney:[50]

Recount is a made-for-TV political drama about the 2000 US Presidential election. The show was written by Danny Strong, directed by Jay Roach, and produced by Kevin Spacey (who also stars in the film). It premiered on HBO on May 25, 2008, and the DVD was released on August 19, 2008.